IBM's announcement on Monday that it plans to buy Ascential Software Corp. for $1.1 billion in cash emphasizes the rapidly growing importance of the enterprise data integration market. Along with consulting services, Ascential offers products for enterprise meta-data management and integration, useful for building data warehouses and complex business intelligence systems.
Enterprises are increasingly turning to service oriented architectures (SOAs), both to exploit SOA's potential for eliminating redundancies and accelerating project delivery though the consolidation and reuse of Web services, and as a means of streamlining business processes among departments and organizations.
IBM has introduced a new spam-fighting tool that analyzes the domain identity of an e-mail message to help block spam. The approach uses a challenge/response method, but sends the challenge only if e-mail appears to be spoofed.
Has the traditional integrated development environment gone the way of the dinosaur? The company that invented the IDE seems to think so...sort of.
Compuware Corp. has enhanced its QACenter automated functional and performance testing suites in both the enterprise and performance editions. The enterprise edition now includes TestPartner 5.3, the most recent version of Compuware's functional testing software. The performance edition features enhancements to Compuware's load testing application in QALoad 5.2.
Although the enterprise service bus, or ESB, has only really become a product category recently, the term is getting plenty of mention lately. With the convergence of ubiquitous Web services and an IT focus on reuse and cost cutting, it's a good time for vendors with ESB products.
Software tools to simplify and accelerate Web application development continue to evolve. Along those lines, ClearNova is shipping a revised version of its rapid application development software platform, ThinkCAP 6.0, that helps non-J2EE developers build and maintain Web applications.
JBoss Inc. launched its first annual user conference in Atlanta, March 1-2, by unveiling two initiatives designed to promote its “professional open-source” strategy and expand the JBoss ecosystem.
As the mobile device market has become hotter and hotter, making quick changes to a device's user interface design has become a key challenge for manufacturers racing against time-to-market issues.
Most organizations struggling with the relentless spread of unstructured data would like to reduce the amount of it they generate. Marist College would like to make more.
When the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York reopened last November after a two-and-a-half year closure for "the most extensive redefinition of itself since its founding," the museum's $858 million architectural expansion grabbed headlines.
The ZigBee Alliance has begun promoting a new adopter class level of membership, which the group hopes will appeal to companies that want to develop ZigBee-based products, but don't care about extensive participation in the organization promoting them.
Wind River has upped the ante on its open-source strategy by upgrading its membership in the Eclipse Foundation and proposing a new project for device software development.
We've all heard the complaints about the Java 2 Enterprise Edition platform: It's difficult to use, too heavy-weight for most developers, and too abstract by half. But those complaints are probably more about Enterprise JavaBeans than J2EE, says Ted Farrell, chief architect for application development tools at Oracle. And developers who don't like EJBs shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There seems to be a consensus among open-source technology watchers that the Eclipse platform has reached a tipping point in its evolution toward widespread industry acceptance and even popularity. The recent EclipseCon trade show offered plenty of evidence to support the idea--primarily in the form of brand-name companies either jumping on board for the first time or ratcheting up their involvement in the Eclipse Foundation.
Microsoft's acquisition of Groove Networks may have more to do with personnel than with technology.
Sonic Software was one of the first to market with an enterprise service bus (ESB) product. Now the company is nicely positioned to take advantage of that early lead, as more and more companies move to adopt initiatives around Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs), with their promises of lower costs and non-proprietary solutions.
As the quest for seamless real-time data integration on a single platform continues, Informatica Corp. has released the first in a series of updates to its PowerCenter product.
A wave of innovation is sweeping the computer industry into a new era of mobility, says Sean Maloney, EVP and GM of the Intel Mobility Group. In fact, about a third of all the processors and transistors being produced today "end up being carried around by somebody."
Virtualization is fast becoming the must-have server-side capability. In fact, the technology that decouples software from hardware is well on its way to becoming a "standard fabric of the data center," says Raghu Raghuram, director of strategy and market development for VMWare.